Trade routes can overcome US hegemony

The joint EU-US statement that formalised the political agreement reached on 27 July in Scotland between President Trump and President Von der Leyen on tariffs cannot be welcomed with the 'it could have been worse' argument. As if to say that if one threatens to give you two slaps and you only get one, you proclaim yourself satisfied. On the surface, however, it would appear that you have minimised the damage. But only on the surface, and for several reasons. Firstly, it is by no means proven that it would have been in the American interest to give two slaps instead of one. Out of metaphor, higher tariffs would probably not have responded to the American interest in maximising tariff revenues. Secondly, there has been, and continues to be, a strong opacity in the negotiation conducted by the Commission, a negotiation in which the member states did not expose themselves directly, but negotiated and continue to negotiate behind the scenes for the distribution of tariffs on the various commodity sectors, in the most convenient way for each of them. That this defends the common interest, and not that of the strongest countries or lobbies, is by no means given. We wonder, then, whether it is not now more advantageous for each country to negotiate for itself, even if this would mean destroying the idea and substance of Europe even further. But the real reason why the damage is by no means minimised is that with this understanding the hegemonic logic has been accepted for which there are no rules except the decided, and changing, rules of the 'imperial power'. By accepting bilateral negotiations on tariffs, Europe has agreed to put a tombstone on the WTO (World Trade Organisation) and on the idea that international economic relations must respond to shared and negotiated rules. Above all, it is not at all true that companies can now move within a framework of certainties, albeit more onerous than before. In fact, a dangerous system has been endorsed in which the unpredictable will be part of the system itself and this will weigh on investment decisions and their geographical location.

But the argument still remains: what could have been done differently? Fortunately, it seems that, also due to Italian pressure, the suicidal path of imposing retaliatory European tariffs on US imports was not followed, as this would have further damaged the European economy. But the political, i.e. geopolitical, response to US choices that respond to a radical change in their foreign policy and which now appears as an attack on the existing geopolitical balances has been abandoned. The political response consists in looking to the rest of the world for understandings that move towards new multilateral rules and do not, on the contrary, endorse the mere destruction of the current ones. It is not just a matter of looking for new markets for individual goods, but of having an idea of what the framework within which global economic competition will take place in the near future will be. In 2024, EU exports accounted for 29.3 per cent of world exports while East Asian exports accounted for 32.5 per cent (source Ice Report 2024). Together, EU and East Asian exports thus accounted for two-thirds of world exports, while US exports accounted for 8.5 per cent of world exports. Looking at imports, the picture does not change much: EU and East Asian imports accounted for 27.8 per cent and 28.2 per cent of world imports, respectively, while the share of US imports stood at 13.5 per cent. This is the picture of world trade we face. To which must be added the weight of other Western countries affected by US trade aggression, such as Canada and Great Britain. We are, therefore, talking about economic areas that could find a terrain for dialogue and cooperation that goes beyond the opposing G7-Brics blocs and that, on the strength of their commercial weight, may not be subject to the hegemonic moves of a single country, albeit an important one like the United States. The need to follow this path is all the more necessary in the face of a danger to the world economic order far greater than tariffs. The danger concerns the US administration's strategy of supporting the introduction of dollar-denominated stable coins into the international monetary system, i.e. private digital currencies anchored to the dollar as a medium of exchange and store of value. This is not a question of introducing a technological innovation to which digital currencies issued by central banks can respond, but it is an attempt to reinforce the 'dollarisation' of the international monetary system, with a regulation that would only be American (see the recently passed Genius Act) and that would cut the central banks off from controlling the money supply, i.e. from controlling monetary policy and thus exchange rate stability. Europe, along with the ECB, is mute and astonished, and eurozone governments are silent. But this is not a technical issue, it is a political and important issue. It is a unilateral challenge brought by the US administration to the international monetary system that came out of the 1948 Bretton Woods Conference, and survived de facto even today. This is also not an issue that Europe can address except in connection with the other major areas of the world that are involved and that have an interest in monetary stability as well as trade stability, which are interconnected.